Red Bull has announced that Formula 1 design legend Adrian Newey will exit the team in 2025.
It said Newey, the team's chief technical officer, will step back from F1 design duties this year and instead focus on Red Bull's RB17 hypercar project, with Red Bull adding that he "remain involved in and committed to this exciting project until its completion".
The Team announces that Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey will leave the Red Bull Technology Group in the first quarter of 2025.
— Oracle Red Bull Racing (@redbullracing) May 1, 2024
The engineering supremo will step back from Formula 1
design duties to focus on final development and delivery of Red Bull’s first hypercar, the… pic.twitter.com/jkYL0EiU7B
Newey will also attend specific races in support of the trackside team across the rest of the season before his departure, which will be "in the first quarter" of next year.
Newey has been with Red Bull since 2006 and was a key part of the team's transition from an upstart into one of F1's powerhouse teams.
It has swept both the drivers' and constructors' championship titles in each of the two seasons of F1's current ground effect era and is well on course to continue that run in 2024.
But formal confirmation of his exit comes after a week of speculation that Newey was set to leave over a combination of long-held points of conflict and fresh issues, which have proved irreconcilable.
This includes, more recently, a concern that his role in Red Bull’s current success has been undervalued by the team, while another suggestion is that he did not want to be sidelined from F1 to work exclusively on the RB17 - the hypercar project Red Bull has announced he will see through to completion.
While he raised those concerns a year ago, after which a new deal was struck to keep him at the team beyond the expiration of his contract at the end of 2023, his discontent appears to have been revived by the controversy around team boss Christian Horner at the start of this year.
That has also come at a time when there is a wider political struggle for power at Red Bull.
Red Bull's announcement said Newey's "vision and technical leadership" was a key part of its success in F1; including its success with Max Verstappen so far in the ground effect era and in the 2021 season before that, Red Bull has clinched seven drivers' titles and six constructors' crowns.
It also became only the fifth team in F1 history to record 100 wins in Canada last June and since then has only been beaten to victory in a grand prix twice.
Newey was not quoted on his motivations for leaving beyond saying this was "an opportune moment to hand that baton over to others and to seek new challenges for myself".
"I would like to thank the many amazing people I have worked with at Red Bull in our journey over the last 18 years for their talent, dedication and hard work," said Newey.
"It has been a real privilege, and I am confident that the engineering team are well prepared for the work going into the final evolution of the car under the four-year period of this regulation set."
Newey thanked Red Bull's shareholders - the company's late co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz, Mark Mateschitz, and Chalerm Yoovidhya - for "their unwavering support" as well as Horner, Red Bull CEO Oliver Mintzlaff, and his manager - ex-F1 team boss Eddie Jordan.
Horner said that he would be "eternally grateful" to Newey for "everything he brought to our partnership".
"All of our greatest moments from the past 20 years have come with Adrian’s hand on the technical tiller," he said.
"His exceptional ability to conceptualise beyond F1 and bring wider inspiration to bear on the design of grand prix cars, his remarkable talent for embracing change and finding the most rewarding areas of the rules to focus on, and his relentless will to win have helped Red Bull Racing to become a greater force than I think even the late Dietrich Mateschitz might have imagined."
